A reader of The Paris Review asks for recommendations to him through depression: “books that will show me why to live and how, and books that will allow me to escape my present torture. Both need to be pretty easy to follow.” This post suggests many titles, and blog reader recommend many more. I don’t know if any of the readers recommend the Bible (Oh, I see someone does), but I think the poetry suggestion is very good: old sonnets, Wordsworth (even his silly stuff), Robert Frost, Billy Collins. I also wonder if painting, cooking, or gardening would help this person.
Category Archives: Reading
Souring on E-Book Samples
A reader in the United Kingdom talks about problems with Amazon’s Kindle e-book samples, for example, finding books with far stronger writing on the sample pages than throughout the book.
I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords
Over at I Saw Lightning Fall, our friend Loren Eaton links to a Wall Street Journal article by Joshua Fruhlinger, in which he explains why he gave up on e-book readers and went back to dead tree tomes.
I BROKE UP WITH E-BOOKS last year after a flight from Los Angeles to New York. My first-generation Kindle and I had been together for five years, but I knew we’d have to go our separate ways when, an hour into the journey, it completely shut me out. Or rather, it shut down. I’d forgotten to charge the device before I left.
Upon arrival in New York, I coolly walked into a bookstore and bought a paperback version of the book my Kindle wouldn’t let me read in the air. It felt good to be back on paper, turning real pages. I realized then: E-readers are needy, but a paperback will always be there for you.
Here I find myself in the awkward and almost existentially self-contradictory position of being on the side of progress as over against tradition. Before I owned a Kindle I had all the standard Luddite objections—I loved the smell and feel of books¹, I did not want to be dependent on an electronic device that might fail or get damaged at any time, and by thunder, paper books were good enough for my grandmother, and they’re good enough for me!
But as you know if you’ve been following this blog, those objections evaporated as soon as Hunter Baker (author of Political Thought: A Student’s Guide) gave me a Kindle 3 in a random act of kindness. I very shortly made some surprising discoveries.
The most surprising was that I don’t love the feel and smell of paper books nearly as much as I thought I did. In fact I’m able now to admit my secret shame for many years—that I’ve always had trouble holding books open (I’m not a breaker of spines), and had found it somewhat tiring, in long reading sessions, to hold a book open at a convenient angle. An e-book doesn’t have a facing page to curl back, and its lightness makes it ideal for reading in comfortable situations, like when I’m stretched out on the couch. For ease of use, the Kindle has paper books beat in almost every situation. Continue reading I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords
What To Read Next?
Sherry has a long list of reading lists from various sites, plenty of material to inspire, ignore, or distain. If I was anywhere near a decent blogger, I would pick out titles I knew nothing about and mock whoever it is recommending them. But, no. I must move on.
Smart as a box of rocks
And since we’re on the subject of Patrick Henry College, Marvin Olasky at the World Magazine blog quotes from a recent interview with Dr. Ben Carson, who answered the question of a Patrick Henry student about whether any teacher had especially helped him to attain success.
He tells a story that resonates with me, because I had a similar experience. He thought he was the dumbest guy in the class until one day when a teacher asked a question and an amazing thing happened:
Everybody was staring at me. They could not believe all this geological information spewing forth from the mouth of a dummy. But I was probably the most amazed person because it dawned on me at that moment that I wasn’t stupid.
I realized the reason I know all that information is because I was reading books. I said to myself, “Aren’t you tired of being called a dummy?” I said, “What if you read books about all your subjects? Can you imagine what the effect would be?” And from that point on, no book was safe from my grasp.
Reading Flannery
Biographer Jonathan Rogers is hosting discussion on stories by Flannery O’Connor all summer. See the reading list here. The first story is up this week, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
Study Says Novels Influence Readers
I know scientists of all stripes choose to study things that may seem obvious to us in order to thoroughly understand why they happen, but somehow this one seems like a high school science fair project. A researcher “suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing.” Yes. Yes, they can be.
In other research news, people will judge a body by his facial hair. An online poll shows the soul patch and chinstrap beard are the most offensive.
Reading Fiction Could Save Your Mind
The Art of Manliness recommends that men read fiction for cognitive development. They say most men stick to non-fiction.
While many men have stacks of books accumulating on their “to-read” pile, chances are that pile is composed primarily of non-fiction tomes. For the past 20 years or so, the publishing industry has noted a precipitous decline in the number of men reading fiction. Some reports show that men make up only 20% of fiction readers in America today.
They list a few reasons for men sticking to non-fiction, but not the one I’m most familiar with. I’ve heard most often that men want to read something true or that which they perceive as productive. Fiction, they would say, is just escapism.
But fiction reading, AoM reports, will improve your creativity, empathy, and theory of mind among other things.
What Do Children Read, Publishing Predictions
An editor talks about how J.K. Rowling’s books opened up the world of children lit, and he strays into how nice he thinks it would be to have fewer books printed.
Roger Sutton says we’re pressed to believe children don’t want to read, but they are “reluctant to read what? If you put down that novel and look around, you will see that lots of so-called reluctant readers are reading plenty; they just aren’t reading fiction, which in this age constitutes ‘real reading’ as defined by ‘real readers’—mainly teachers and librarians.”
On the future of print publishing, he says, “Every author in this room is going to disagree with me on this, but there are too many copies of too many books being published. A little curation would be a good thing.” So if libraries were the place to go for holding a book in your hand, then we would have a sane publishing world. Is he ignoring home libraries, or does the future have room for that?
Is There a Literary Canon?
Is there a literary canon of books everyone who considers himself educated or maybe civilized should read? I mean, everyone reads Pookie and the Moonlight Vularoo, but what about the stuff teachers put on assigned reading lists?
D.G. Myers talks about personal Best Of lists here, saying the idea of books everyone should read is a quaint throwback to the 20th century. “If literature is no longer a part of every civilized American’s cultural inheritance, you can thank your English teachers, who gladly coughed up their authority over it,” he writes.
Myers also culls together a list of top authors according to how much has been written about them by scholars. Henry James and William Faulkner top the list.